Well Hello from New York City. Thats it we have finally left and are on day three of our excellent adventure.

After a tearful thursday and friday we left for Heathrow where it all began well with us having to empty our rucksack of everything at security and place our sleeping bags in the bag whilst stuffing the contents of the bag into a our pockets. Apparently you can only take one bag each through and a sleeping bag counts as a bag. Tony did suggest that we wear the sleeping bags and hop through security but this did not go down too well!

After this I (Ali) was randomly selected to be x-rayed!!!!!! She asked if I objected and when I asked what would happen if I said yes she said you will be taken to the front and patted down by hand. Lets just say I would prefer to be x-rayed! I stood in various weird positions whilst I was x-rayed. I did think about asking if they could give me a health check but didn't think that she had much of a sense of humour.

Our flight went without any problems and Tony did the usual thing of panicking that his TV did not work, when in fact it did just fine.

We got a bus to manhatten and then walked 10 blocks with our bags. This would not have been so bad except that it is absolutely sweltering here! The temperature is in high 20's and we were both so hot yesterday (saturday) that we are wearing shorts and t-shirts.

After checking into our hotel on friday we went for a walk to find an open top bus tour. We ended up (in true colley/wicks fashion) walking for miles and not finding what we were looking for. We eventually got to the Brooklyn Bridge and found a bus which we flagged down. When we got on the bus we asked some people behind us how much it cost and found that it was $50 for a two hour tour. After deciding that we could not afford this luxury so early on in our trip we preceeded to get off the bus at the next stop, which just happened to be right back where we had started in the first place!!! After our three hour treck through chinatown we decided to call it a day and head back for an early night.

On Saturday (yesterday) we woke up very early 5:45am local time (our bodies still on UK time) and decided to try to get up empire state early. However the clouds were so low that you could not see the top and we decided against it. We then walked to Times Square and it was amazing, because it was so early there weer hardly any people around and we managed to get some good pictures. We realised how lucky we had been when we returned at 5pm and it was heaving with tourists!

We also went to central park yesterday and managed to walk pretty much the whole length of the park! This resulted in sore feet for Ali and a sore fanny for Tony (thats american fanny not English) (This ones for you Nathan). So we took a break in Strawberry Fields (memorial to John Lennon, opposite building where he was shot) where I (Ali) was pooped on by a bird whilst Tony fell asleep!!!!!

We also visted Toys R Us with a giant ferris wheel and FAO Shwartz, famous from the film BIG and yes they did have the giant piano on the floor. As you can see we missed the cultural spots like the MET and History museum for the toy stores!!!

We have already been up the Empire State today and are heading down to the financial district for ground zero and statue of liberty.

We have tried to add some pictures but after about 20 minutes they did not work so have given up. Will try again later.

We are off to Atlantic City tomorrow and will keep up dated.

Lots of Love

Ali & Tony xx